Recently I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with the best friend of my 80-year-old aunt. The lady - Thelma I will call her - is a vivacious 88 years young and lives in a small town in the Southeast. Thelma still drives and she owns the house she and her husband (now almost 20 years gone) bought over 50 years ago to raise their family in. She is healthy and active in the community and expects to live quite a bit longer (she has two older sisters alive!), and Thelma told me frankly that she cries herself to sleep every night because she is quite alone, her only son and only hope for grandchildren (and great-grandchildren by now) having been killed in Viet Nam nearly 40 years ago.
Some perspective is due here, of course. More of us came home from Nam than died there (of course). Many people have lost children - even only children - to disease and accident (of course). And Thelma's son, I learned, was a volunteer and a Special Forces officer; one could - a bit heartlessly - argue that he was asking for it. (Me? I was a draftee medic who got in and out in a year and a half.) Thelma's son must have been a hell of a man, I'll bet we would all agree, if we could meet him - which we can't (of course).
So I must ask . . .
Is there someone who will contend that the world is any better, hell, any different, than it would be had Thelma's son been able to stay home and get married and have children and be out hacking away on the golf course this afternoon?
I mean (of course) Thelma's son and 58,000 other Americans along with some number of Koreans and Aussies and (of course) 2 million Vietnamese who died before their time in a violent manner for no very good reason . . .
Why?
I very seldom meet other VN vets in varous places I work (we must be a sickly lot, or maybe a lot of us live under bridges, I don't really know), but twenty-some years ago I happened to be present when a new guy in an office told a supervisor about my age that he had 'lost a son' in Viet Nam. 'Bummer!', said the boss. 'Did you see those Bears on Sunday?'
Why?
That's a problem for me, and it's a real problem when I hear someone assert that 'we' must prevail in Iraq for some obscure reason, and it's a problem every time I have lunch with Thelma.
Why?
I suppose it's evil, but I sometimes fantasize that one day my son might encounter Lucianne and hear her whine about the fat son who was felled by some painful wasting disease or was run over by a Fedex truck or was otherwise taken from us - it certainly won't be because he put his fat ass in harm's way in Iraq - 'before realizing his full potential' . . . Sometimes I'm really philosophical about it, but most of the time I hope he laughs at her. That's just me, I guess.
What do you think?